Sport Shooter Portraits

I have some friends who are sport shooters. They take part in competitive shooting events locally and nationally in Denmark and after some cajoling, they agreed to be photographed.

OUTFITS

Not knowing much about the sport but having watched the Olympics with the shooters wearing their funny suits, strange eye wear, funny gloves and odd looking guns. I knew it would make a good subject to photograph.

I was amazed with the amount of gear they turned up with, almost as much baggage as I take on a shoot. Luckily they came to my studio.

There are subject to strict rules about taking the guns out of their homes and away from the shooting ranges and the amount of ammunition they can carry, even with the .22 caliber size they use so no bullets were fired in this shoot!

SET UP

The set up was pretty simple, I need to get some better BTS pictures to show these set up’s…..My usual light, my favourite 80cm gridded  Octabox being the key light with another light a fill coming in from camera right.

I wanted a nice contrasty final image. The toned black and white images you see here are pretty close to what I imagined. With contrast it’s always best to keep the raw file nice and flat, you can easily add contrast but it is hard to take out.

After seeing the outfits I liked the colours and textures on the jackets they wear and processed some colour pictures too.

POST PROCESSING

Pretty simple I just love the D800 for the amount of detail it captures and the Nikkor 24-70 is just so sharp around F8. I just added some extra contrast  and I did the black and white conversions in my favourite bit of software, Nik Color Efx Pro and the Silver Efx Pro module within that.

Thanks to Esben and Birgitte for allowing me to shoot them, sorry for the pun!

THANKS FOR LOOKING.

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